"In my years coaching, I have coached four players who have gone on to play professional baseball in one form or another. One of the greatest joys I have had is to see one player in particular develop from a six year old T-ball player who did not even know how to put on his glove, into a strapping 18 year old who is playing minor league baseball somewhere in southern Florida today. Though his name rarely makes the baseball news, I am proud to say that I was his first coach, and that just maybe, I had some small role in helping him make it."

Warren Levy
Schlumberger Alumnus

I started playing baseball almost as soon as I could walk. Some of my earliest memories are of playing catch with my Dad in our backyard during the long summer evenings in Toronto, Canada where I grew up. The undying passion of most Toronto sports fans is hockey. This was before the Blue Jays had won their two World Series titles in ’92 and ’93, and summer was seen as a time to train in hockey camps. Baseball was something played in spare time with a few friends on vacant lots in the neighborhood. But I loved to play catch with my Dad, and I wanted to play baseball every chance I could.

When I was seven years old, my grandfather and grandmother took me to my first professional baseball game, we saw the Toronto Blue Jays play the Kansas City Royals. I will always remember the impact the game had on me. For the first time in my young life, I actually managed to pay attention on something for more than 10 minutes.

Growing up as a player, I found that baseball was something I was good at. I loved to play the game. The slow pace and moments of intense action were a combination that I really enjoyed. I loved to feel the air thicken as dusk set in, and wait with anticipation as the lights came on before a night game. I played every summer in leagues, and continued to play with my friends whenever I could talk them into coming outside.

When I was fourteen years old, I started to loose interest in the game as my time became more filled with school, summer jobs and a social life with my friends. One of my coaches had a few people involved professionally in the game take a look at this 6 ft tall, 230 lb fourteen year old who could smash the ball over the fence in full size baseball diamonds. I had toyed with the idea of trying to play seriously, but I was considered too slow of a runner to ever have a legitimate shot of making it. I stopped playing in the middle of that summer after having hit 21 home runs in 7 games playing in a low level league in our suburb of Toronto. I knew I would never play professionally, and thought that other things were more important.

The spring of the year after I stopped playing, a good friend of mine asked me if I was interested in helping him coach his six year old nephew’s T-ball team. At first I hesitated, but eventually Andy talked me into it. Andy and I spent the next four summers helping the same group of boys grow into great baseball players. That first summer ignited a passion in me to help other players realize as much of their potential as possible.

Once I started to coach, it became important to me to understand the best way to coach. I started to watch other coaches, both on the local ball diamonds and in professional games. I tried to see what each one did, not so much in the strategy to win, but in the way each one of them tried to motivate their players. There are coaches that yell. There are coaches that plead. There are coaches that cajole their players into trying their best. There are truly special coaches that somehow manage to inspire players to greatness with words. I found myself becoming none of those classic styles of coaches. Rather, I became a coach who watched his players. I try to get to understand my players and determine what mades them tick; what will motivate them to exceed their potential, and what might push them to fail. For each player I have coached, my style is slightly different.

My last year of high school, we couldn’t find a teacher who wanted to take responsibility for coaching our team. I managed to convince the school that I could take care of it. Learning how to motivate players the same age as myself was a new challenge. It was made especially interesting by the fact that on our team we had six players who had played for the national team and five others who had played for our province. In the end I focused on keeping it fun. Laid back practices and a lot of joking around was what kept this talented group of players coming back day after day. We had a successful year, and it was a great way to end my time in high school.

The summer after I graduated from high school, I was looking for a summer job. My sister came home one afternoon having signed me up for an interview with a new summer baseball camp. What better way to pass the summer than playing baseball? I spent the next 10 weeks teaching groups of girls and boys the finer points of the game. Some of the kids were there because they loved baseball, and far too many were there because their parents didn’t know what to do with them for the long hot summer. The kids started with a huge range of abilities. Some played highly competitive baseball, while others had never even played T-ball. What made it even more challenging was the range of ages, everything from seven to fifteen years old shared the same camp and were involved in the same activities during the summer. Over the two summers I spent coaching at this camp, I was able to refine my skills at getting the most out of a wide variety of players. I learned to focus on making it fun for the kids who didn’t really want to be there. For the good players, the challenge was not only to improve, but to pass on some of their skills to the other players around them. The most rewarding part of these summers was molding a team out of a disparate group of players, who not only played well together, but had a great time doing it.

Later I would refine this ability by coaching at my University. The Canadian Interuniversity Baseball Association had formed in 1993, and we were hoping to put a team in for the 94-95 season. Two of us, both students, started on the long and hard road of putting a team together. As the Association was new, the University did not recognize us as an official sport and we had no support from the school. Everything from uniforms, to baseball, to renting the fields had to be paid by the players, and out of our pockets. We managed to put a team together in 1994, but did not join the league fully until 1995. Motivating a group of University students who had 40 hours a week of classes to drag themselves out of bed at 5 am everyday was not easy. We had practices in the mornings and often in the evenings as well. The players would arrive exhausted after being up late studying, and leave even more tired. We played on the weekends, two games on Friday and one on Saturday. Road games were anywhere from three to seven hours away. The time on the bus was spent studying or catching up on much needed sleep. Watching these guys around me refuse to let lack of sleep get in the way of playing baseball, helped to remind me what I loved about the game. I would watch the grin on the face of a player who had just hit a home run, or see the spontaneous joy ignited by a great play or a win pulled out in the last minute and it was infectious. That summer was the first year I picked up my glove and bat to play competitively again in over 5 years.

The testament to all of our hard work is that the team is now officially recognized by the University and is still going strong. Students still run the team, and continue to pay for most of the costs associated with playing.

Through coaching I have been able to realize that the games we love as children can be a way as adults to recapture that unconditional joy that we thought was lost once we are no longer “children”. In coaching T-Ball I learned how to help unskilled players develop and grow to love the game. During the summers at the baseball camp, I had to get kids who often didn’t want to be there to listen to me and pull in the direction the team needed to go. In high school and University, I began to understand how to motivate and keep the respect of others who were often older and more skilled than I was. Each of these experiences has also helped me to understand how to motivate people to exceed what they believe to be the limit of their abilities. These skills have helped me immensely in my professional career. I still offer my time to coach any chance I get. And now when I jog out onto a baseball diamond, I feel a little bit of the same happiness I used to feel playing catch with my dad in our backyard when I was a child.

Team sports not only pull us together, they help us to learn how to excel and how to inspire others around us to excel. Sports help us to learn the joy of winning and how to handle defeat. It can be a great way to get to know people and get to know ourselves. Whatever sport it was that we loved as children, will still put a smile on our faces if we are only able to play it with the same abandon and joy that we played it with when we were young.